Novelization is a Nasty Word

By Christopher Piehler

While movies adapted from novels tend to attract beloved thespians and figure heavily in Oscar® voting, novels adapted from movies earn more money than respect.

According to Greg Cox, who has written novelizations of Daredevil and Underworld and whose Ghost Rider, based on the film starring Nicolas Cage, comes out in February, his readers have persistent misconceptions about what he does. First, he points out that novelizers almost never get to see a movie in advance. All they have to work with is an early draft of the script. "If you're lucky," he says, "you get a stack of still photos and maybe a copy of the movie trailer. So if the physical descriptions in the book don't quite match with the final film, it's not our fault! Sometimes you just have to cross your fingers, make something up, and hope that the monster in the movie looks something like what you just described."

Another fact that readers can have a hard time grasping is that the books are, in fact, based on the movies. Cox says, "This sounds obvious...but you'd be surprised how many times I have to explain that, no, I did not invent Daredevil, or that, no, Underworld was not based on my book. Heck, there are people I've known for years who are still fuzzy on this point."

Max Allan Collins, who has written 20 novelizations, including those based on Saving Private Ryan, Air Force One and The Mummy, would like to change the nomenclature. "The term ‘novelization' is tossed around a lot, though in the field we tend to call them movie or TV tie-in novels. Novelization is an unfortunate term that tends to diminish the process, or, anyway, the end result." Collins recently co-founded the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers (IAMTW.org), "in part to get the Rodney Dangerfields of publishing a little respect."

Collins himself is more like the Leonardo da Vinci of pop-culture fiction. He has two original novels coming out in the first half of 2007: A Killing in Comics ("suggested by the conflict between the creators of Superman and DC Comics") and Black Hats: A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone, which "has an aging Wyatt Earp encountering a very young Al Capone, with Bat Masterson along for the ride." Collins is perhaps best known for writing the graphic novel Road to Perdition, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law. Then there are his Nathan Heller private eye novels, which deal with famous unsolved mysteries like the Roswell Incident and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. He also wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip for 15 years, has created video games and puzzles, and is a screenwriter and filmmaker. He's done novelizations of two of his own films, but perhaps most surreal was his experience with Road to Perdition.

"I wrote the novelization of David Self's screenplay that was based on my own graphic novel," he says, "[and] this wound up being the weirdest and most unpleasant of the novelization experiences, as I was restricted from adding any back story or additional dialogue, even though these were my own characters. Still, the book sold well, and I certainly didn't feel like having anybody else write a Road to Perdition novel." He has since written two prose sequels, Road to Paradise and Road to Purgatory.

Collins's and Cox's big-name résumés notwithstanding, the life of the media tie-in writer is not a glamorous one. Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, while Cox is a resident of Oxford, Pennsylvania, where his typical book tour might include "a nearby library or bookstore, but nothing big."

The novelization process starts with the delivery of the script. The goal is to get the book in stores a few weeks to a month before the movie comes out so that, as Cox says, "the books serve as miniature billboards for the movie." Novelizers typically get one to three months to churn out a book, though Collins has worked much faster. "It was a last-minute decision to do a novel based on In the Line of Fire," he says, "which had been passed on by every New York publisher until Clint Eastwood won all those Academy Awards for Unforgiven. Suddenly, I was asked if I could do a novel of it in two weeks. I did, but it took two months to recover."

According to Cox, "one of the biggest challenges in writing a novelization is turning a 100-plus-page script into a decent-sized novel." He usually translates one script page into three manuscript pages, but it can be a stretch. In this regard, he especially admires his fellow tie-in writer Christa Faust. "How the heck did she get 400-plus pages out of Snakes on a Plane? I tip my hat in admiration."

In many cases, though, Cox says, "You deviate from the script at your own peril, mainly because you never know how fundamentalist the licensing person at the studio is going to be. Some licensors understand that you sometimes need to flesh things out or move things around to make the story work as a novel, but others insist that everything be word-for-word from the script."

Collins's method is to "follow the script out the door. By that I mean I do every scene in the screenplay, pretty much in the same order as the screenplay, though sometimes some rearranging is necessary. My preference is to play fast and loose with the dialogue, really fleshing it out and creating novel dialogue, which is a different animal than screenplay dialogue. A half-page of dialogue in a movie script may spawn a five- or even ten-page scene in a book."

So how do you become a tie-in writer? Both men came to it through comics. Cox got his break - the Daredevil novelization - after having written three X-Men novels. He then went on to edit a number of novelizations, including The Mothman Prophecies, which spent eleven weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. Similarly, Collins was writing the syndicated "Dick Tracy" comic strip when Warren Beatty decided to make a movie of it. "I served as a creative consultant on the film," he says, "chiefly, suggesting which villains from the strip to use. I just sort of raised my hand and offered to write the novelization... It became the biggest-selling single book of my career: around a million copies in the U.S. alone."

Sales are not always so robust, though, and just as professional journalists now have to compete for readers with amateur bloggers, novelizers can end up covering the same ground as fan fiction writers. "I don't know that we're losing any audience to fan fiction," says Cox, "but sometimes there's fan friction: the unofficial writers often resent the professionals, in part because the fans are, well, fans - audience members with an unusual amount of interest and enthusiasm for a property. We can sometimes be viewed as nonbeliever interlopers into the holy domain."

In taking beloved stories and translating them into another medium, novelizers are doing what writers have done for centuries. It's just that, where Shakespeare lifted many of his stories directly from Holinshed's Chronicles, novelizations can have slightly more convoluted roots. Asked what his favorite tie-in book is, Cox replies, "One of the best novelizations I've ever read was Paul Monette's novelization of Nosferatu the Vampyre, which was a novel based on a German remake of a silent movie illegally based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. (Not to be confused with Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen.) The Monette book was really well written, which is especially impressive when you consider its complicated pedigree!"